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Horror movies were at a crossroads in 1980-81. The success of Brian De
Palma's Carrie (1976), John Carpenter's Halloween) (1978)
and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) knocked the genre
demographic down a peg, lowering the average age of spookshow
ticket-buyers to below the age of consent. Despite the sophomoric
excesses of the slasher cycle, there remained an audience for more
traditional Gothic fare, boasting supernatural themes and featuring more
seasoned actors than could be found in the average teen-scream body
count flick. Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979),
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), Peter Medak's The
Changeling (1980), George Bowers' The Hearse (1980), John
Irvin's Ghost Story (1981) and the Italian import The House by
the Cemetery (1981), directed by Lucio Fulci, all focused on mature,
professional characters encountering the unknown not as an unwitting
rite of passage but in an elective bid to make some sense of chaos and
calamity. Falling squarely into the latter category, Armand Weston's
The Nesting (1981) finds acutely agoraphobic novelist Lauren
Cochran (Robin Groves) quitting Manhattan's discomfiting Upper East Side
for a quiet place in the country that, as happens, turns out to be
haunted.

Relegated to footnote status for being the last film of Gloria Grahame
(who died of cancer four months after the film's May 1981 premiere),
The Nesting feels like the work of a horror enthusiast who lacks
a grasp of the principals. Making a bid for legitimacy after years as an
adult filmmaker, Armand Weston secured a unique location in the 120
year-old octagonal Armour-Stiner House in Irvington, New York (this
architectural style was all the rage in the mid-19th Century, thanks in
large part to phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler) and the services of
Grahame and legendary monster man John Carradine but The Nesting
remains the runt of the 1980s haunted house litter. For a former porn
director, Weston takes too much time getting to the point while much of
his film feels cribbed from existing courses, such as Roman Polanski's
Repulsion (1965), John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to
Death (1971) and Curtis Harrington's Ruby (1977). Grahame and
Carradine are required to do the expositional heavy lifting, beaching
Weston's two leading men with little to do. Star Robin Groves screams
like a champ but her fully committed performance cannot elevate a
plodding script by Weston and Daria Price.

At a time in which horror movies were pulling out all the stops in terms
of onscreen violence to orchestrate a new school symphony of terror,
The Nesting is frustratingly demure. The film's first third is
taken up with a latticework of odd sights and sensations for the
frazzled heroine, reserving for the 30 minute mark the first moment of
full-on horror- which turns out to be an accidental death unrelated to
the unfolding paranormal situation. Things get more interesting three
quarters of an hour in as a supporting character whose relationship to
the eerie octagonal house may be more complicated than he admits is
pulled to his death in a forest pond by pallid, bloody hands - a
startling, effective moment that has, unfortunately, no analog elsewhere
in the film. Though the moment is explained by the final fade-out, it
commits the cardinal sin of establishing an expectation for balls-out
horror that is never met or satisfied. Revealing itself as a tale of
justice from beyond the grave, The Nesting never seems to be in
command of its own plot mechanics, throwing everything at the wall in
its final act - including a bassinet and a Ford pickup truck - in the
vain hope something will stick.

A VHS perennial during the video cassette boom (at which time it tended
to occupy one of the lower shelves in your local video store's horror
section), The Nesting has long been out of the public eye. Making
its digital debut under the auspices of the niche DVD label Blue
Underground, the film looks surpassingly fine, with satisfying black
levels and vivid chromatics - although it takes a longish while for the
first splash of blood to assert itself and prove this conclusively. Shot
with diffusion filters to soften, it would seem, the appearance of
leading lady Robin Groves (an attractive New York theatre actress who
went on to a principal role in Silver Bullet in 1985), the source
materials for Blue Underground's widescreen (1.85:1) and anamorphic
transfer are variable in sharpness but flesh tones are natural and the
abundance of New England greenery is the film's cheapest special effect.
The film's original mono soundtrack is offered with the options of a 5.1
Dolby and 6.0 DTS remixes. Extras on BU's disc run to extended/deleted
scenes, US and Spanish theatrical trailers, three 30-second American TV
spots and an image gallery comprised of posters, pressbooks,
behind-the-scenes candids, newspaper clippings and documents relating to
the legal tangle with John Huston's film company over the proposed title
Phobia.